


Paths of the Living

by paperiuni



Series: Trifles from Thedas [5]
Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Action, Canon-Typical Violence, Comrades in Arms, Developing Relationship, Drama, Friendship/Love, Gen, M/M, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Porn with Feelings, Wall Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-16
Updated: 2015-08-16
Packaged: 2018-04-14 22:35:00
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,547
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4582689
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paperiuni/pseuds/paperiuni
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>First mind the living. The dead are dust and air.</i> Another day of fighting sends Bull into no-so-covert disarray over Dorian.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Paths of the Living

**Author's Note:**

  * For [amurderof](https://archiveofourown.org/users/amurderof/gifts).



> This, too, began life as a kiss prompt, but then it sprawled in an epic fashion, so here it is posted on AO3.
> 
> Fabulous acknowledgements to Toft, who fixed my beginning, to Bri, who held up the middle and gave the best pep talks, to James, who knew just what to do with the ending, as well as to Lore, who read and squeed when I was feeling 'whelmed. (Stealth thanks to Joan, who took with my surprise smut-writing with great grace.) My hat is off to all of you. ♥
> 
> Prompt: Dorian x Bull, " 'I almost lost you' kiss"

Suledin Keep has turned out to be a fucking maze, and its every dead end is crammed with red templars.

A group of six, most of them veined and speckled with hideous lyrium growths, are coming up the ice-marbled stairs. Bull flexes his grip on his axe haft, waiting for the skirmisher leading them to be in melee distance.

From the parapet behind Bull, Sera sinks an arrow into the man's visor slit and sends him toppling over the open side of the steps. Metal crunches as he strikes the courtyard below.

"Inquisitor!" Bull hears Dorian call out, but there's no answer. They have a choke point at the staircase, while Lavellan and Cole work open the portcullis that hopefully leads out of the keep. In the next breath, Dorian flings down a crackling pulse of lightning that scythes through the remaining five templars.

Abandoning his guard position, Bull starts down the stairs. He shoves aside the tall, battered shield of the first stunned templar and kicks her flailing into her comrades. She entangles the legs of the man right behind her. The other three scatter with alarmed cries, but Bull is already upon them.

With sparks and flashes of errant lightning still jolting at them, it's quick, grisly work to cut them down. The last one gets her shield up to deflect Bull's first swing; her stance wavers. He steps to her right, hammers a heel into her knee and cleaves through her light plate and her ribs.

"Shite!" The bang of a door thrown wide on its hinges follows Sera's shout. 

The ironshod door at the other end of the parapet is open. Bull glimpses a jagged clump of red lyrium on the back of a behemoth, bowing to fit out through the doorway. Sera clambers atop a crenel, for precious reach and cover. As Bull scrambles back up the steps, Dorian hisses with the effort of dropping a fresh, blue-glinting barrier over the three of them.

Their breath curls in the air in shimmering clouds. They've been running the gauntlet of the keep with little respite, from one tight courtyard and narrow passage to the next.

To their left the portcullis gives a long, creaking wail as it moves.

"Come on!" Lavellan appears in the frame of the empty doorjamb in the gatehouse wall, to the right of the portcullis. Cole is at her heels, dressed lighter than any of the rest of them in the biting cold.

Sera's bow twangs with another arrow that's deflected from the behemoth's lyrium hide. Dorian hugs the parapet as he shuffles towards the rising portcullis. Bull sees the reason for his slowness: tattered, smoky tendrils of energy flow towards him from the crumpled bodies of the templars.

The first time he sighted Dorian funnelling mana from the dying, the itching unease wouldn't leave him for hours.

 _Afraid I'm encroaching upon your territory?_ Dorian quipped, uncomfortably close to and yet far off the mark. _As if your reaving tricks don't draw on necrotic energies. I know that tingle in the back of my neck._

That was a fair enough point--and they've come a long way since. At this moment, every lyrium potion they can save for later is an edge they'll need.

"A little faster, if you please!" Lavellan barks, her soft voice sharp with urgency. Whatever mechanism moves the portcullis, it doesn't seem to need tending. The chains haul the rust-speckled metal bars higher by the moment.

"Dorian." Bull snaps his head towards the gatehouse. "Go."

"After you," Dorian says through gritted teeth, but allows Bull to bring up the rear. The doorway is made for one soldier to hold, which forces the behemoth to practically double over. It's been a while since Bull's seen one that far gone: the beast's little more than an ambulatory heap of crystals.

Sera fires one more arrow that remains jutting from a seam between the crystals. Then, with a shrug and a long tearing of wood, the behemoth is free and raking for footings on the snow-strewn walkway.

" _Go_!" Bull repeats. Muttering a Tevene epithet, Dorian turns and bolts. Sera's boots thump to the stone and she trails him in a billow of loosened yellow scarf. Bull gauges his options.

They need a moment to collect themselves. The hit-and-run with groups of templars is starting to cost them too dearly. Elfroot potions and Lavellan's spells have kept them on their feet so far, but each gash and bruise she has to mend whittles down her reserves. There are Inquisition forces somewhere in their wake. They were meant to sneak in as a small and efficient vanguard, only Suledin Keep's not half as abandoned as their scout reports claimed.

At least this should be a way out, not further in.

Up ahead Cole slides under the climbing portcullis. Lavellan ushers Sera and Dorian out ahead of her. An arc of her hand calls up a shining spectral blade, a recent fruit of her training with Vivienne.

Bull continues to fall back, hoping he and Lavellan can wedge the incoming behemoth in between the two of them. The others should be safe in the next courtyard.

He's barely thought that when a roar erupts from beyond the portcullis. The stonework under his feet trembles in resonance. There's a great sloughing of falling snow, and then a thunderous stomp against cracking flagstones.

"Oh, this place is sodding _barmy_!" If he didn't have a behemoth bearing down on him, Bull would relish Sera's lip. "What _is_ that?"

"They woke it," comes Cole's voice. "Soothed, snared, sculpted, until all it heard was red."

Stone and mortar are smashed with quaking force on the other side. The behemoth turns the corner where the parapet joins the gatehouse wall, skidding on the rough ice sheening the walkway.

"What's going on there?" Bull demands.

Dorian sounds more dismayed than spirited, however he reaches for frippery. "A giant, it seems. Delightful." Fire whooshes through the air. Bull doesn't need a magical bone in his body to sense the sudden forge-like heat.

"You could have fucking _started_ with that!"

"Bull." Lavellan catches his eye from under her hood. " _Help them_."

Before he can protest, chill threads of the Veil encase her, and she surges forward from her footings. Blurring back into sight fifteen steps ahead, slight against the mass of the behemoth, she brings her knight-enchanter's blade around in a sweeping stroke. The humming edge sends shorn lyrium shrapnel flying.

The gate chains are still running. Bull casts a last harrowed look at Lavellan, but she's right. With the mark and her blade, she stands a chance toe to toe with the creature.

Unlike the other three. Cole, slipping about a battlefield with his daggers, ducking in and out of memory, makes for a poor frontline fighter. On the other side Sera's bow sings with a harsh thrum, and flame rushes into being.

Bull ducks under the spiked ends, low to avoid snagging his headscarf or scraping a horn. The gatehouse opens onto a broad flight of steps down to a bigger courtyard. To the left of the stairway, the ground slopes downwards at a sharpish angle.

Dorian's laid a wall of fire diagonally in front of the stairs, to serve as a barrier. Sera edges along the walkway that branches off to the right of the gatehouse, above the flat section of the courtyard. They've emerged to an outer part of the labyrinthine keep: this side would meet any invaders.

Bull snatches hold of all these details before the huge, misshapen bulk of the giant steals his focus.

It carries clusters of carmine lyrium on its back like a gruesome shell. The fingers of one hand have turned into crystal-encrusted bludgeons, and its one deep-set eye shines a baleful red. At the height of its knee or so, Cole is skirting in from the right in that flicker-flow of motion that's him coaxing the world to _forget him, forget him_.

Dorian's taken the walkway that extends on the left, in the same line as the portcullis. Coils of gathering magic enshroud him like oily smoke, twining about his fisted hand.

"Oi, oi! Ugly!" Sera waves her bright scarf like a pit fighter in the arenas of Tevinter, baiting some animal lean and mad with hunger.

The giant opens its tusked maw to bellow at her. It cradles a piece of crumbled wall in one hand. White flashes in Sera's glove: a flask to speed her getaway once she has the monster's attention.

Bull fits himself into their gambit. He starts down the steps, slow enough to give Dorian room to finish his casting. He can angle past the fiery wall and at the left leg.

"Any time now," Sera says, lower. Her flask cork snaps off with a flick of her thumb.

Immersed in his magic, Dorian doesn't react, but his aim is clear. He casts up his hand; Bull expects the usual sensory backlash, the unreal smell of funeral flowers, the hint of wood ash on his next inhalation.

The giant swerves with a heavy, swaying step. Out of the corner of his eye Bull sees Cole start, fully visible and _there_ in his surprise, and make a foolhardy beeline for the giant.

Bull hears his own warning shout tear from his lungs.

The giant lobs the chunk of fortification at Dorian. No aim, no grace, just a bunching of its lyrium-threaded muscles. The missile impacts upon the walkway at his feet. 

The spell tears apart in his grip, the glow of his staff snuffed as it clatters away. Mortar seams split and gravel rattles as the weathered stones break loose under the blow. With a hoarse yell, Dorian tumbles from his perch and vanishes from Bull's line of sight among the shattering masonry.

The flames on the ground gutter into smoke.

A shower of bright sparks flowers on the parapet as Sera douses herself with the flask, her voice a mere high scream of rage. The giant jerks, twisting down to swing a hand at its own knee. His dagger in a backhand grip, Cole rakes the blade down the giant's calf.

The sharp trip-hammer blow of his own heart slams Bull back to the moment.

The lyrium. The lyrium whispers the danger of mages to them. Dust and powdery snow drift thick above the heaped stone and frozen earth.

"Sera, Sera, the eye!" Cole's voice isn't made for shouting. He dances around the giant's feet, striving for its tendons, thicker than his arm. Black, sluggish blood smatters the snow at a slash of his daggers. The giant thwacks at the ground as it fumbles after its nimble assailant. Several of Sera's arrows protrude from its shoulder and neck.

Ice grinds and creaks on the other side: Lavellan, fighting. If Bull leaps down now to scrabble at the collapse, he might as well cut Sera and Cole down himself.

First mind the living. The dead are dust and air.

Bull tears his stinging eye away from the settling stones and strides down the steps.

Moving smooth as water flowing, Sera puts a shaft through the giant's cheek, and it snags at its face with a growl of pain and annoyance. This is no dragon fight, but the monster can weather a wealth of damage for its sheer size. Lavellan's tied up by the behemoth, and Dorian--

Bull's closed the eyes of so many fallen. Muttered the prayers over their broken bodies and left them to the carrion eaters.

The blood-dark fury is very close. He opens himself to it. His axe shears across the pillar-like shinbone, the angle slightly wrong to crack it, but the giant gouges at him with a massive, grappling hand at once.

 _Fight someone your own fucking size_ , he'd quip on a normal day. Now he purges his mind of all but the kill.

Veering aside, Bull hacks two-handed at the giant's arm. Blood gouts hot and viscous against his shoulder, and then he is too late to avoid a kick that staggers him back a good several steps. If not for the dwindling shell of Dorian's barrier, it would've caved in a rib or three.

Bull fumbles for his axe again before the thought to _thank him for that later_ can fully form.

"Ha!" Sera crows somewhere above. The giant shambles towards the parapet where she stands. Bull drags breath back into his lungs. One of Cole's blades is stuck on the side of its knee, stabbed so deep it must've been wrested out of his grip.

Snow and rubble are thrown up as the giant summarily scrapes a hand across the parapet. Sera shrieks, her triumph cut short.

"Fire!" Cole calls in warning. Cast by his sure hand, a ceramic grenade shatters against the flagstones by the giant's feet and spits out a ragged plume of flame.

It has the intended effect: the giant wheels around. Its feet stomp and twitch at the burning oil spread on the ground and splashed over it. The parapet by its lyrium-crowned head is bare.

Just as horror leaps in Bull's thoughts against the merciless focus of the reaving, Sera's voice carries reedily from over the parapet. "Get that lumbering shitebag! I'm-- _nngh_ \--fine!"

Fine enough for cheeky. More than Bull can say for himself.

He sprints towards the creature, grabbing the looped chain at his belt. It's not long, made from strong, light silverite, but it's suited for this purpose. While the giant struggles to get rid of the fire licking at its flesh, he flings out the hooked end of the chain.

On the second try, the prongs sink into the giant's arm below the shoulder. Bull sets his feet, winds the chain around his right hand and hauls. Despite his leverage, the giant tugs wildly against his pull.

Cole comes to his aid by thrusting his remaining dagger into the soft back of the creature's knee. It folds over its wounded leg, and the courtyard trembles as its knees plow to the ground. Bull sees the arrow sticking out from the very corner of its eye. Blood oozes down its face in murky rivulets.

The agony in the monster draws him in, feeds the torrent of rage that drowns a wrenching despair, and he follows.

He severs three of the giant's fingers with a downward stroke. How much can the thing bleed before its death? How long past _that_ will the lyrium keep it going? Smaller hunks of red crystal, like bizarre armour rivets, jut from the sparse patches of hair down its front.

Swift and silent, Cole veers to the side to finish his efforts at crippling the giant. It screams, an awful sound of raw agony. Bull takes a step back, ready to carve into its middle, when it raises its maimed hand and seizes him.

The desperate, two-fingered grab would still suffice to dangle a smaller man off his feet. The lyrium growing from the hand rends his coat and pauldron, and his head snaps back in a quick, painful yank. The stumps of the fingers sluice blood down over him.

His momentary daze gets the giant the chance to sweep in its other hand and heave him roughly back towards the stairs. The courtyard spins in his dimmed field of vision.

 _No_ , he tells the pain. _Settle. Stop._ Even on its knees, the giant scrambles furiously after him. Cole's frantic voice echoes from behind it, small and faraway.

Bull teeters, struggling to center himself. _Damn._

Brilliant arcs of lightning whip up from the ground and fold into a simmering sphere around the giant. Branched bolts lash against its face, jarring its advance to a howling halt. 

Dragging his wits together, Bull doesn't spare a backwards glance to his rescuer as he dives forward. As soon as the spell fades and opens a way for him, he sinks his axe into the giant's twitching shoulder. Its bones are near too large to break. He shatters the clavicle with another fury-driven strike. That finally drops the creature onto its face, and he beheads it in three more messy, axe-blunting blows.

All goes quiet.

He takes five long breaths during which his mind is blessedly empty. The battle haze shrivels away, the blood cooling against his cheeks.

And he remembers.

The smashed walkway. Dorian falling. The screaming ache in his chest to value the likely death of one companion above the lives of the others.

Cole dashes past him; drawn by the motion, Bull trails him with his gaze. He hurries down the slope to where the remains of the walkway fell, and Bull has to steel himself before following. No helping it.

His boots chafe on the cold flagstones, the brace repeating its dull jangle. The silence almost echoes around them. Lavellan must've handled the behemoth. The lightning spell--

"Andraste's marble _arse_ ," Dorian says, and spits without a shred of dignity. "There's gravel in my blighted _everything_. Careful, please--" He waves a hand at Cole. "I'm rather sure my foot is pinned."

He's buried to his hips in a mound of dirty snow, in the lee of a relatively whole piece of the walkway. He's grey from his exposed head to his fennec-lined winter coat, slathered in grit and melting snow. Cole approaches cautiously, mindful of that the stones may shift.

Bull shuts his eye and tilts his head up as if he can't get breath. The dry winter air rasps heady in his lungs.

"Kid," he says, gruff but gentle. "Go check on Sera and the boss. I'll get him out."

Cole looks up at him, eyes grave. "They're fine, the Iron Bull. We are all fine."

Aside from an interesting collection of bruises and sprains, at least on Bull's part. His head keeps ringing at sudden movements, but he makes his way to Dorian, who's sitting very still, propping himself up on a hand.

"You're quite welcome, by the way," Dorian says. "For the saving of your hide."

"You're one to fucking talk," Bull huffs through a squeezing-tight throat.

"They don't--ahh--let you cast that one without a staff until you've made senior enchanter."

"Right. Maybe I'll sit back and let you magic yourself out of this." Bull brushes down a testing handful of dirt. As long as the slanted chunk of walkway stays where it is, this should work.

"I already did." Dorian tugs on his left leg, then apparently decides it's best left alone. "The barrier kept me conscious."

Bull nods, a few more times than is strictly necessary.

With some patience and wrangling, and the prising off of a buried wall stone trapping Dorian's boot, they get to a point where there's only loose earth and snow on Dorian. Lowering himself onto his haunches, Bull loops an arm under both of Dorian's and hauls him free.

Dorian scoops up the first patch of clean snow he finds, scrubs it across his face and spits once more for good measure. " _Kaffas_. I've been buried alive by a lyrium-tainted beast, and it's not yet sundown. Whatever other wonders shall this day bring?"

 _You not being dead_ , Bull thinks. His heart flows full of that realisation in a way he can't quite grasp. Dorian, irritable and knocked about, with snow in his hood and pinprick scratches all over his face, leaning on him in the stillness after the fight.

He wants to take hold of the feeling and twist it into a joke. His fingers take hold of Dorian's head, somewhat of their own will, but Dorian doesn't resist. Fleeting puzzlement flickers in his eyes. "What--oh."

His question is muffled into the kiss, and it stops mattering. Dorian's mouth slants warm and willing against Bull's own, his arm coming up around Bull's neck. The kiss is heat and need and relief, an unthinking moment made easy as Dorian shifts into it. He tastes of dust and the smell in the air after thunder. Bull wants to peel back his clothes and put his mouth on every inch of his skin just to feel the life beating in him.

Later, if they're lucky. The proof of Dorian's breath on his face, of his fast grip on Bull, will have to do for now.

When they both drop back, Dorian's eyes are dark with something Bull struggles to pin down. He wipes at the dirty blood on Bull's cheek with slow, lingering fingers.

Before the moment entirely fades, Sera calls for them across the courtyard. Cole supports her as they scamper down the stairs, her bow nowhere to be seen. Behind them, Lavellan leans heavily on her staff. Her left arm hangs slack and bloody at her side.

Bull helps Dorian onto his feet. As they turn, Dorian squeezes his wrist, in reassurance or in promise.

*

Once Lavellan's arm is dressed and tied immobile on her front with the scarf Sera volunteers for the purpose, they climb out through a collapsed portion of the wall. That must be how the templars got the giant in, too. The gap in the wall is hemmed by a rugged incline to the southwest, but a footpath descends along it into the rimy trees below. They start down the track amid a soft, feathery snowfall.

They never made it to the heart of the keep. Lavellan makes the decision to withdraw for the day, anyway. After taking one look at all of them, scuffed and weary, leathers stiff with frost and pauldrons and greaves marred with blood, Bull agrees on that account.

Sera says nothing, but when Bull taps her shoulder, then his own, she lets him hoist her up to be carried. Cole has no injuries, only an unusual faintness to his demeanour, as if the dim sunlight were leaching him of all colour. Dorian divides his time between muttering about his filthy state and helping Lavellan manage the path.

"Sorry about the bow." Bull wraps a steadying hand around Sera's calf. Her buckskin breeches have a new tear that slips down under the top of her boot.

"When you have to pick if it's your bow or your bony arse tumbling down the cliff, you pick your bow." Sera leans on his horns a bit.

"Pragmatic."

"Don't you start talking funny. He's bad enough." She waves a hand towards Dorian, needlessly, as Bull's eye is already straying that way. "With his tham-a-turgid whatevers."

A guffaw rasps from Bull. "That he is."

She lapses into silence, and he puts his mind to the task of getting down the slope. They might reach the closest Inquisition outpost soon after nightfall. The moons will be bright, if the snow doesn't get any thicker.

The sun's nearly set by the time they run into the first forward scouts: two women in green Inquisition hoods and woollen half-cloaks emerge from the sparse pine forest. The reinforcements bound for Suledin Keep were thwarted by an untimely avalanche. Haggard but resolute, Lavellan confirms that the captain's decision to delay the offensive was in fact fortunate. Behemoths and red templars are one thing, lyrium-corrupted giants rather another.

"It heard another voice," Cole offers, after Lavellan's sent the scouts on their way, with due words of warning. He seems a wisp of a presence in the snowbound twilight. "The giant. The scarlet song and the velvet whisper."

"What do you mean?" Lavellan frowns.

"Creepy, please," Sera groans. "Long sodding day of templar-kicking. I'm full up on weird here."

"I'm reminded of that chevalier we met in Sahrnia." Dorian comes up from the rear of their group. Bull stops himself from reaching out to touch him, even in a friendly clasp of his shoulder. "Michel de... something or other. He spoke of a demon near Suledin Keep."

"Oh, of course. I swear I wrote it down." Lavellan fumbles for her travel journal, evidently remembers her bound arm, and only sighs. "I may talk to too many people who need something."

"They are four," Cole says. "Old voices of dust and darkness, of want and will. I am me, but I don't want to be here." He flattens a hand to his chest, on the amulet covered by the same old tunic. Lavellan made him wear a cloak so he'd blend in in the wintry villages of the Emprise.

"Me either." Bull pats Cole quickly on the back. "If I've got my bearings at all, there's a lit hearth and some not awful food an hour's trek that way."

"That's a charitable assessment of Inquisition troop cooking." Despite the rue in his voice, Dorian steps gamely to take the lead.

"Well, we might feel better about demon-hunting after supper," Lavellan says with what little pep she has left in her, and amid shared, tired chuckles, they continue walking.

The outpost sits on a hillock overlooking the ice-locked river that flows past Sahrnia, too. The Inquisition took over a deserted inn and its outbuildings; it serves as a headquarters, and a palisade and a timber watchtower fortify the position. They meet the first arrivals from their waylaid infantry support, limping in shivering and shamefaced. Lavellan spares a moment to reassure them, before the outpost healer herds her away for a proper look at her injury.

She joins them again when they're huddled around the fire in the kitchen tent. The inn has a building that housed a kitchen, but now it houses a forge and an armoury instead. So they eat a stew of potatoes and salted deer in the meagre firelight from the cooking pit, standing up. The cook conjures a jar of juniper berry jam from somewhere, and Bull spoons it equally into their bowls before Sera can steal the whole thing.

"Stringy game and sour berries, consumed while freezing. This is why I left Tevinter," Dorian says over his second helping. "Please tell me there's somewhere to have a bath."

"There's a bathhouse in the back that the officers use." Lavellan points with her spoon. Her freshly knit bone demands caution, so she's got the one stool, and her bowl in her lap. "I think I'll just ask for a tub in my room. This one time."

"Terrible misuse of power, my friend." Dorian tuts. "They might only almost fall over themselves to do your bidding."

She glowers up at him, to very little avail. Bull gets sidetracked by the way Dorian's answering chortle clings to his ear, a light, content sound.

They take the two rooms the supply officer has cleared for them along old lines: Sera and Lavellan share one, Dorian and Bull the other. Cole, who doesn't quite sleep, tells them he'll join the returning soldiers in the common room. "It's like the tavern back at Skyhold. Meetings, music, memories. I like to listen."

"You do that, kid." Bull sets his bowl on the stool where Lavellan just dropped her own. Dorian follows suit, then glances at Bull.

"I do note there's still giant's blood on you. A detour to the bath, perhaps?"

His sparking awareness of Dorian aside, it's a sensible idea. Some hapless armourer--or their apprentices--will burn the midnight oil cleaning all their assorted kit for the morning. For once, Bull's happy enough to leave the job to someone else.

"Yeah," he says, and Dorian smiles a lopsided smile, runs a hand down his arm, and goes on ahead. Bull scoops Sera against his side, just so she can lean in for a breath and then smack at his arm in mock irritation. Muttering a good night to her, Cole and Lavellan, Bull leaves them to nurse mugs of tea and a last bit of hushed conversation.

The bathhouse is startlingly Fereldan in style in the Orlesian highland. Bull has to stoop through the doorway. There's no water pump, unlike in most of Skyhold, but wooden barrels of well water line one side of the room. A brick oven stands in a corner, a copper cauldron placed over it, and a pipe with a simple twist valve leads from the cauldron to the low, stone-lined tub. They leave their clothes on a wide bench beside the door. The floor, Bull realises as he puts his bare feet to it, is actually slightly concave to one side, the tightly laid, unmortared flagstones curving to another corner with a drain pipe.

"It's almost clever, no?" Dorian eyes the drainage system. "Nobody needs to carry their dirty bathwater out. On that thought, that might explain the southern resistance to cleanliness." He crouches to stick his hand in a bucket of water until it steams with the heat from his fingers, and upends it summarily over himself.

"Poor bastards." Bull, likewise, throws a pail of tepid water on his head to rinse off the worst grime. The fire's been going for some time, warming the room and the barrels. "Guess the aqueduct was never a big thing on this side of the Waking Sea."

"They've all crumbled down. Amphitheatres, on the other hand," Dorian says. "I counted two on the other side of that collapsed bridge."

"The way the dragon flew?" Bull may have been busy looking at the dragon. Dorian's fond huff at him affirms the suspicion.

And now, still, Dorian draws his eye like a shaft of sunlight through a dense canopy. He bends to let hot water spout into the tub, the water already there gone lukewarm. The smooth brown skin of his back is no longer unmarked; Bull could count in his sleep the scars that the last two years have left there. Among the fainter ones, two stand out: the starburst phantom of an arrow that went into Dorian's back ribs in Crestwood, and the blistering kiss of an apostate's lightning spell forming a tattered web over his shoulder. They've healed cleanly.

Either could have, Bull knows, been a worse injury. Vivienne or Lavellan might not have been at hand. The daily peril to their lives rides alongside them as another companion, unmentioned but seldom forgotten.

"Get in." Dorian makes a beckoning motion that suggests Bull missed his first prompting. "It's not that spacious. I'd rather sit in _your_ lap, if it's all the same to you."

Shit, he must be out of sorts. The long day explains some of it, but not nearly all. Bull dashes another bucket of water down upon himself, just to be sure he's clean enough to soak. They might not be the last people to use the bathhouse before tomorrow. He settles into the tub, folds out his knee with care, and lets Dorian sprawl on top of him, his back to Bull's chest.

They're both more than a little worn by the day's exertions. All the same, there's a leap in Bull's chest when Dorian turns his face into the side of his neck, short, prickly stubble scratching his skin. This is the first time in a week that they'll sleep under a roof, as opposed to a tent.

He walks the fingers of his right hand up Dorian's shoulder, kneads into muscles stiffened by staffwork. Dorian seems to have come through the fall he took with surprisingly few hurts, though only morning may tell the extent of his aches.

"No more idle chatter in you tonight?" Dorian mumbles, tilting into Bull's touch.

"Something you wanna talk about?"

"You've been doing rather a lot of staring into thin air."

Maybe he ought to have expected that. As much as he heeds Dorian, his subtle signs and mercurial moods, that seems to be running both ways lately.

"We'll clear out the keep." Dorian slides a hand up to grasp Bull's left one, fingers firm on his wrist. Like at the keep, after the fight. "Giants, demons, whatever else. I'd not lose any sleep over that."

Bull laughs, rough and startled, before he can help it. "Yeah. Almost forgot who I was talking to here. That was pretty good, digging yourself out of there to save all our asses."

" 'Pretty good'? That's rather parsimonious of you."

Bull likes to think that he and the unexpected twist are well acquainted. Practically old friends. He's seen so many situations go to shit in so many ways that his pool of stories would last him to hoary old age. But here, solid in his arms, Dorian seems to have shifted: both trusted friend and sharp-eyed partner, and something he doesn't know how to handle.

When he nudges at Dorian's back, Dorian lifts himself so they come face to face. Bull paints the edge of his jaw with a wet thumb, smiling with a hint of teeth.

"You're fucking magnificent, is what you are."

Dorian favours him with a rasp of warm laughter. "That's more like it."

He's baiting. They both know it, and Bull welcomes it. Dorian's whim pulls him out of his swamped thoughts to focus on the moment here and now, and his body laid heavy and pliant across Bull's own seems a vital reminder.

The peculiar summer scent of thunder is gone from Dorian's skin--some kind of resonant echo from his magic, Bull got lost in the rest of the explanation--so only water and faint salt meet his mouth as he presses it to Dorian's shoulder. Dorian mutters approval, lets Bull lick a languid trail down to his nipple and clamps a hand on his horn to keep his mouth there.

Wanting Dorian is easy. He can, very nearly, guide his troubled thoughts into that, into the spaces where they're alone, each other's only concern, with everything else willfully put aside.

Once he gets the first actual moan out of Dorian, a low humming _oh, oh yes_ , he kisses his way back up to Dorian's bared throat. There Dorian's patience falters: he tilts Bull into a kiss with insistent thumbs sliding under his jaw. A treacherous grip, strong, clever fingers on vulnerable skin. Dorian saved him with those hands. His next breath is harsh with the swelling of arousal.

"I saw you watching me," Dorian says against the last of the kiss. "The whole way down here."

"Don't need much of a reason." Bull strokes an open palm up his side, down his arm, until he can bring Dorian's hand to his own mouth.

"All the dirt and snow didn't dampen my appeal?"

"Damn, Dorian." Bull's teeth scrape across Dorian's palm, then he draws two fingers into his mouth just to feel Dorian twitch with pleasure. "You took a piece of the blasted keep in the face and made that bastard eat lightning after that. You were glorious. I could've fucked you right there."

"Good." Dorian's voice drops, not a little ruinously, to a breathy note of demand. "Seeing as I thought of you on every step down." In the water, his fingers press into the inside of Bull's thigh.

Bull would tease him for his choice of words, to point out he was supposed to keep an eye on the boss, but the door is latched and the space around them is half dark, hushed and close, and so he only winds his free arm around Dorian. "You did, huh? Keep going."

Dorian does, murmuring into Bull's ear as his fingers nudge his filling cock, slick and hot and deft. "You know, it is terribly hard to decide. Would I like to go up and try how the questionable cot we were given holds up, or..."

Smoothing a fingertip around the raised shape of the arrow scar beside Dorian's spine, Bull chuckles. "Yeah, having sex in the bath might be the one thing that's too filthy for even me. Have--oh, _shit_ \--have a little pity for the poor sods coming after us."

Dorian squeezes his cock again, his thumb gliding across the head, a glimmer of heat and amusement in his eyes. "Be a spoilsport, then."

"Nothing's to say we can't play here first." With a ragged inhalation, Bull slides his hands down to Dorian's arse and tugs him close, his half-hard cock slipping against Bull's own. "I could open you up good and slow, fuck you with my fingers until you can't stand it, not..."

The muffled, longing sound Dorian makes derails Bull for a brief moment. Dorian braces a hand in the centre of Bull's chest, sweeps a hasty kiss over his mouth, and says, "Don't dare go anywhere."

He climbs out, dripping water and not very light on his feet, and Bull watches him raptly as he goes to dig through his belt pouches. Dorian carries his beauty as a weapon and a shield, a crafted facade for the world, but like this, naked and unwound, he makes Bull's breath catch.

Then he's slipping back into the tub, tucking a copper vial into Bull's palm and fumbling to kiss him. The urgency hidden in their frothy back-and-forth finds an outpouring in the kiss; Dorian starts it and then bends into it, his fingertips catching and stroking at Bull's neck, his shoulders, his back. Bull pulls him in with ungentle need to feel the shivers of tension in his body.

Often, when they fuck, Bull has a plan in his head: a loose trail to follow. It could be laid by fancy or by need, whatever he reads in Dorian, and sometimes breaks midway through, but he likes the solidity the conceit lends him.

He heaves Dorian up to sit on the edge of the bath without much thought beyond pressing a kiss on his ribs and his slickened fingers up inside him. Dorian's lungs swell with breath, and a string of muttered Tevene drops from his lips. Grasping Bull's arm, the clasp of his hand tight to suppress the tremor in it, he dips his head to see the lazy, deliberate movement of Bull's hand. There's something breathtakingly intimate to the gesture. Bull bites back the urge to kiss him, and lets him watch with dark, half-shut eyes instead.

Soon enough, when Bull pushes his fingers knuckle-deep and curls them just so, Dorian rolls his hips and nearly kicks Bull in the leg, a shaky throb of need. Bull tugs Dorian's head against his shoulder, cheek against his matted hair.

" _Now_ ," Dorian manages when he has words again a few hammering heartbeats later.

"Mmhm?" Bull can't resist humming. He knows. It's better when Dorian says it.

"Now," Dorian repeats, laying biting kisses across Bull's neck, "you pick me up, put me to the wall, and fuck me until I scream."

"Because that's polite to everyone at this hour." It takes some effort to make the crack, with the way lust and something more aching and more tangled surge in his gut.

"You said no to the bathtub."

"Yeah, like I could refuse you." That's closer to the truth--and cuts deeper--than Bull cares to contemplate. Better to stick to the moment, especially when the moment has Dorian shuffling back to let Bull clamber out of the water, then crowding close, as if stealing one more kiss trumped moving matters along.

The kiss turns into a series of wet, hurried glances of lips as they get to the wall. The stone is striped with chalk and smoothed by runnels of moisture, but warm to Bull's hand. If it weren't, Dorian would no doubt complain. Bull makes to lift him, oil-slick fingers slipping on his buttock, and scrubs them off on Dorian's thigh, rousing a dismayed noise from him anyway.

" _Vishante kaffas_ , if you weren't about to fuck me--"

"Good thing I am then." Now Bull cups Dorian's arse, his knee slotting up against Bull's elbow. Dorian winds his arms around Bull's neck for support. There's some fumbling and the distracting skim of Dorian's cock across his own; then Dorian lets up a throaty, open-mouthed moan as Bull slides into him.

He tries to make it a deep, dragging thrust, knowing how Dorian exults in the first feeling of being opened and filled. His heel kneads hard into the small of Bull's back, a sharp spur to urge him on, and Bull smothers a raw noise of his own into Dorian's canted cheek.

The wall makes for some challenge, even with Dorian gripping him fast. Bull sets his feet on the rough-worked stones of the floor and allows his focus to wind down where it's been fighting to go: Dorian, held against the wall, his fingers scratching at Bull's back, his head thrown back so his damp hair catches on the wall.

His mouth against Dorian's temple, muttering filthy, reverent nothings in his ear, Bull keeps up a slow and steady tempo. He shifts Dorian's knee up and feels the echoed change in their movement; Dorian practically wails at the next stroke of Bull's cock within him.

"Ah, ah, _Bull_ \--" He strives for a grasp of Bull's head. The pace is hopelessly foiled, but Dorian's mouth, twisted up towards his, is an entreaty and a demand he must heed.

Oh, he understands, pressing Dorian harder to the stone to make the angle work at all, here it is. The proof he sought, barely knowing its shape. It spreads through him at the heels of the heat in his bones, in his veins. Dorian's mouth moves against his in equal need and care, husking words under the gasps and brief, burning kisses.

Finally Bull has to break free, resettle his grip of Dorian, and put his unravelling attention to his thrusts. Dorian bites him, a too-hard rasp of teeth on his shoulder; he sets his teeth against the groan that wells irresistibly from his throat.

He'd grumble about Dorian's goading if he had the breath for it. Dorian's legs wrap tighter around him, though they're both straining, against the exertion, against the rushing need, against each other. Tension presses against his spine, slipping its bounds until he feels his own movements quicken, hard and erratic.

"Bull," Dorian says again. His voice is low, scoured with want. "Oh, don't fight it."

Bull makes a stammered sound that might be a question, but Dorian seems to interpret it. His fingers curl around the nape of Bull's neck in a distracted caress. "Don't fight it. Come inside me, I want to feel you."

It takes little more than that. He doesn't know what he was waiting for--Dorian's sufferance, Dorian's pleasure, Dorian, who gives Bull what he needs in the shape of his submission, his challenge, the tumbling of his walls when they're together.

"I'm here." Dorian's hand cradles his head, steady, sweat-slippery fingers clutching at him. "I'm here."

"Oh, fuck," Bull breathes out, his eye clenching shut. With a helpless snap of his hips, he buries himself in Dorian, in his body and voice and strength. Dorian mumbles a breathy litany into his neck, gripping him through the surge and ebb of the orgasm.

In bits and pieces they rearrange themselves. Bull lets Dorian drop first one foot, then the other to the floor, only to gather him close again with an arm trembling from holding his weight. Wrapping his arms around Bull's middle, Dorian looks up, his eyes cinched at the corners. For a moment Bull just watches him back and drinks in the sight of that dear, pensive face. A nearly stemmed trickle of desire runs in Dorian, but he waits for something else.

Bull cants his head then, breaking the eye contact. He does have the truth Dorian expects.

If asked, he couldn't give the hour or the day, the place or even the one reason for it. But it comes to him that he laid his heart at Dorian's feet long ago, such as he knew how.

"I frightened you today," Dorian says. "Not that I meant to, of course."

Bull holds him a little harder. Nods against his head.

Dorian smooths a hand over his back. "And now I'm quite brazenly using the post-orgasmic haze to talk to you about it. If, that is, you wish to."

At the stilted caveat, Bull lets out a chaff of a laugh. Today at the keep he did what he had to do. Their success required that he fight, rather than scramble to solve Dorian's uncertain fate.

He leans down to set his mouth against Dorian's, a ghost of a kiss, their lips a hair's width apart. "I'm good," he says at length, and Dorian inhales as if to argue. Bull shuts him up with the kiss lingering between them, makes it real, presses it to Dorian's lips like a pledge. "I'm good. I've got you."

To which Dorian chuckles, relief rolling in the quiet sound, and snatches another soft, still kiss from him. They stand there a while, in the long, low shadows of the fire.

Then Bull slides a hand between their bodies and palms Dorian's cock, stroking him through a gasping, laughing build until he clings to Bull's arm and comes sharp and easy over his fingers. Bull rests a hand over Dorian's nape, a gentle and silent feeling caught in his throat, while he comes slowly down.

As they finish their washing and dress in cleaner clothes, Bull feels the drowsy pull of his own bone-deep exhaustion. It's a clean, heavy sleepiness, the kind that will sweep you away the moment you allow yourself to calm. Draped in a borrowed woollen cloak over his shirt and breeches, Dorian takes his hand.

Bull lets him lead.

_end_

**Author's Note:**

> Comments are cherished!


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